Charlie's Burgers

Taste of Toronto—not to be confused with Toronto Taste—is returning to Fort York this July for four days of refined gluttony, and event organizers just gave us first dibs on the list of participants so far. This year’s roster of restaurants and their chefs includes returning favourites David Neinstein from Barque Smokehouse, Los Colibris’ Elia Herrera, Mark McEwan of the McEwan Group, Michael Bonacini alongside his Oliver & Bonacini team, Richmond Station‘s Carl Heinrich, Victory Barry from Splendido and The Harbord Room‘s Cory Vitiello. New this year will be Michael van den Winkel of the Indonesian snack bar Little Sister. All of them will be serving three different dishes, each one costing between five and 10 “crowns” (the festival’s currency and just a fancy way of saying “dollars”). Between mouthfuls, guests will have the option of attending culinary demonstrations, hands-on cooking classes with top chefs (last year, Momofuku Milk Bar’s Christina Tosi did some) and wine tastings with Franco Stalteri of underground supper club Charlie’s Burgers. Tickets for the event go on sale mid-April; the full lineup of participants will be announced closer to the date of the event as more chefs register.

This past summer, former Barenaked Ladies front man and consummate foodie,Steven Page, touched down in Hogtown to highlight the city’s growing underground and unlicensed food scene for his new show The Illegal Eater.

With a little help from his friends—like special guest Jason Priestley in L.A.—and countless years touring, Steven explores the tastiest and most creative venues across North America, including Toronto’s own Charlie’s Burgers, Cold Tea and La Carnita. For those who can’t wait for the TV airing, the premiere episode is also available for free on iTunes.

Premieres Tuesday October 22 at 9 p.m., only on Travel+Escape

This is a sponsored post. The content is paid for by our advertising partners. Learn more about the Illegal Eater, please visit travelandescape.ca.

In Toronto, the trendiest new restaurants ply an almost cultish kind of casualness, where the greatest sin a new eatery can commit—aside from serving bland food—is taking itself too seriously. Chefs dot their dining rooms and plates with ironic winks: mismatched mason jars, pounding rap music and $30 sirloin burgers served drive thru–style in wax paper wrapping. “Junk” was the theme of last weekend’s Charlie’s Burgers pop-up from ex-Daishō chef Matt Blondin and The Grove’s Ben Heaton, who presented guests, including former Barenaked Ladies member Steven Page, with a meal devoted entirely to upscale fast food. On the menu: a homemade Andouille corndog, a liquid nitrogen–frozen slushie and a flute of Moet Champagne spiked with neon Tang. Here, a slideshow from the $170, 10-course feast.

Charlie’s Burgers, the no-longer-quite-so-elusive dining experience helmed by Franco Stalteri, has released (sparse) details regarding the next Toronto dinner. What we know: the chefs will be former Top Chef Canada winner Carl Heinrich (whose restaurant, Richmond Station, a partnership with Ryan Donovan, is set to open in September) alongside runners-up Trevor Bird and Jonathan Korecki; the menu will include tequila-laden snow cones, trout crackling, wild boar, peach melba and an undisclosed amuse bouche whose entire description reads “something good—by now, we hope you trust us.” Tickets are $225 for the August 12 dinner, which will take place in a mystery location downtown. Foodies looking to score a seat at the event should get their names on the anti-restaurant’s list of potential diners ASAP. Unsurprisingly, we’re told there are already plenty of RSVPs. [h/t Toronto.com]

Last night’s episode of Top Chef Canada kicked off with a little sentimental reflection by the chefs at their digs—the condo that is finally living up to its “luxury” billing now that there are only five occupants (cramming the original 16 contestants in there probably violated some kind of occupancy regulation). Trevor Bird hoped to God that he wouldn’t have to do dessert again (foreshadowing alert!), while David Chrystian announced to all of Canada that he was set to go home and propose to his girlfriend (good luck, David!). This week’s twists and turns, including guest spots from an R&B star, a former MuchMusic VJ and a legend of Italian cooking, in our recap below.

Charlie’s Burgers, the original Toronto pop-up, just celebrated its third birthday in February, six months after the Globe and Mailrevealed its elusive leader’s identity. Having already collaborated with chefs from Canada, England and France, the “anti-restaurant” decided to bring cutting-edge Parisian cooking from Le Châteaubriand—number nine on the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list—to Toronto for a two-evening dinner engagement on Sunday and Monday this week. Sous-chef Agata Felugga and Delphine Zampetti, wife of Le Chateaubriand’s chef and owner, Inaki Aizpitarte, put together a menu using deer and partridge that were hunted and aged especially for the event, as well as vegetables and other produce sourced by chef Jonathan Gushue of Langdon Hall, itself a sometime member of the World’s Top 100 restaurants list. We dropped by the dinner at L’Unità to check in on one of the biggest food events of the season.

Entomophagy, the practice of eating insects, has been the subject of many a food trend story. Apparently, bugs are a nutritious, protein-rich and environmentally sustainable source of food. Now that there’s a worldwide meat crisis looming, the Guardian is reporting on how the UN is taking a serious look at the benefits of farming insects.

In the ongoing battle over which city is Canada’s best for food, Toronto has gained some new bragging rights. The latest issue of Food and Wine came out on Friday, and the revered magazine has two Toronto hot spots in its annual roundup of “100 best new food and drink experiences.”

While the identity of Charlie Burger remains a mystery (most locals speculate that he’s a composite of T.O. restaurant people), the man behind covert “anti-restaurant” Charlie’s Burgers has posted a culinary itinerary of his recent trip to Africa. Burger, identified here as a nonagenarian Dutchman who settled in Toronto in 1999, was accompanied by Madame Burger on a culinary-inspired tour of Kenya, preceded by a stopover in Qatar. The foods sampled were decidedly less risqué than one would expect from the individual responsible for a menu featuring queen ant Thai salad and worm risotto. Sashimi from Jean-Georges’ upscale Spice Market or pastries from Gaston Lenotre’s Doha aren’t wildly audacious choices. Even the infamous Carnivore Restaurant in Nairobi, known for its wild game meats, was only able to dish up some crocodile and ostrich—kind of exotic, but would it dazzle one of Charlie’s own carefully screened customers?

The environment has long been a hot topic among foodies, and this weekend, surreptitious supper club Charlie’s Burgers is planning an unsettling menu centred around bugs, which sustainability gurus say are a readily available source of protein, vitamins and minerals.

But before you pull out the knife and fork, know that not just anyone can chow on crickets at Charlie’s. A prospective diner must give their e-mail address at Charlie’s Web site, answer a questionnaire about their food fixations and, if the Charlie’s team likes the responses, meet at a secret location at an exact time and pay with cash.

• Good news for fans of Michael Stadtländer’s acclaimed Eigensinn Farm: the cultivator-chef will be launching a new restaurant, Haisai, in a neighbouring town. Like Eigensinn, it is based on the farm-to-table concept, though we hope that it will seat more than 12. [Reuters]

• Pasta making is an arduous process, but it shouldn’t be a perilous one. A man working a machine at a Toronto noodle plant lost an arm when the mechanism snagged him, initiating a workplace safety investigation. [National Post]